September 28, 2020 — Alaskans eyed the coming of summer’s fishing, resource and tourist seasons warily.
The influx of outsiders brought new risks of the spread of COVID-19 to a state that had so far escaped the deadly surges overfilling emergency rooms in other places.
Daily coronavirus case counts for people from out of state, dubbed “nonresidents” in state data, rose quickly by July. On some days, they accounted for a quarter or a third of all the new reported infections.
Now the number of out-of-state workers and visitors with confirmed COVID-19 cases has dropped to zero some days, single digits most others.
The reason is pretty simple.
By early September, the tourists and thousands of fishing industry workers who made up the bulk of Alaska’s nonresident population all but disappeared.